The Doctor and Mel go to Paradise Towers for a holiday, only to find the
famed complex in ruins. Long ago, the adults went off to fight a war and
never returned. Left behind are the Kangs, gangs of wild teenaged girls;
the Rezzies, cannibalistic old women; the Caretakers, who ostensibly
look after the Towers; and Pex, who was too scared to go to war. But
also lurking is Kroagnon, architect of Paradise Towers, who has taken
mental possession of the Chief Caretaker and the cleaning robots in an
attempt to rid his creation of human life forever.

Production

In late 1986, with Andrew Cartmel's appointment as Doctor Who
script editor still weeks away, it was left to producer John Nathan-Turner
to find writers for Season Twenty-Four. For the most part, Nathan-Turner
was reticent to use those who had worked on Doctor Who in the
past, since many of them were connected with former script editor Eric
Saward, with whom the producer had had a much-publicised falling out.
Consequently, he was receptive when he was approached by a writer new to
television named Stephen Wyatt. Wyatt had written for theatre and radio,
and had recently begun working at the BBC Script Unit. The dark comedy
Claws had been commissioned for the anthology series Screen
One, and Wyatt was using it as an audition piece in the hope of
attracting additional work elsewhere within the BBC.

Nathan-Turner arranged a meeting with Wyatt, who developed a satirical
idea steeped in Doctor Who continuity. However, when Andrew
Cartmel joined the programme on January 16th, he found that this notion
did not live up to the promise of Claws. Instead, he and Wyatt
discussed developing a story along the lines of JG Ballard's 1975 novel
High Rise, a parable for middle-class existence about a skyscraper
whose tenants descend into pseudo-tribal warfare. Wyatt also recalled
visiting friends at an East End tower block and being disquieted by the
way the building seemed to take on a life of its own. This appealed to
Cartmel, who wanted to introduce some of the same aesthetic into Doctor
Who that he admired in the work of comic book writers such as Alan
Moore, author of The Ballad Of Halo Jones, The Saga Of Swamp
Thing, V For Vendetta and Watchmen. In particular,
Cartmel was keen to embrace more offbeat and complex ideas.

Stephen Wyatt recalled being disquieted by the way a tower
block seemed to take on a life of its own

On January 30th, Wyatt was commissioned to write the first episode of
“Paradise Tower” as a trial. Despite the fact that no actor
had yet been cast as the Seventh Doctor, Wyatt worked quickly and both
Cartmel and Nathan-Turner were pleased with the results. As such, the
remaining episodes were requested on February 19th, with the title amended
slightly to Paradise Towers. Soon afterward, Sylvester McCoy was
contracted to star in Doctor Who, and Wyatt was provided with his
audition tape as a guide to characterising the Seventh Doctor. This
process was helped by the fact that Wyatt remembered seeing McCoy on
stage; he also shared Nathan-Turner's vision that the new Doctor should
echo Patrick Troughton's incarnation.

As the scripts developed, Cartmel encouraged Wyatt to make greater use of
the cleaning robots, who would fill the role of the traditional Doctor
Who monster. The name Kroagnon was originally given to the planet, but
this was later applied to the villainous architect of Paradise Towers
instead, with the world referred to as Griphos. The Caretakers were
meant to be old men gone to seed, while Pex was envisaged as a
muscle-bound oaf who would satirise popular American action heroes such
as Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo.

Unfortunately, finding the right actor to play Pex proved to be a
challenge for director Nicholas Mallett, who was returning to Doctor
Who after working on The Trial Of A Time Lord
(Segment One) the year before. Those actors of the appropriate
age and build whom Mallett considered for Pex were reluctant to engage
in the level of self-parody that the script required. Finally, to
Wyatt's disappointment, it was decided to turn the character's concept
completely on its head by casting Howard Cooke -- a small, slender actor
who was clearly not the physical specimen which Pex made himself out to
be. Meanwhile, playing Fire Escape would be Julie Brennon; she was the
wife of Mark Strickson, who had played the Fifth Doctor's companion
Turlough.

The pool at Elmswell House was filled with bitterly cold
water, much to the chagrin of Bonnie Langford

Production on Paradise Towers (designated Serial 7E) began with two
days of location filming on May 21st and 22nd at Elmswell House in
Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire. This was for the scenes around the
pool -- which was found to be filled with bitterly cold, much to the
chagrin of Bonnie Langford and her stunt double, Ellie Bertram.
Mallett's team then regrouped for a two-day session in BBC Television
Centre Studio 1, starting on Thursday, June 4th. Scenes in the square
and the Rezzies' flat were recorded on both days, together with those in
the TARDIS, the lift, and the third- and fourth-floor corridors on the
4th. Recording resumed with a three-day block in TC8 from Wednesday,
June 17th. The focus was on the hallways of the higher-numbered floors,
along with more material in the lift on the last two days. Other sets in
use included the Red Kang's headquarters on the 17th, the Caretakers'
base of operations on the 18th, and the basement and the Rezzies' flat
on the 19th.

When he became producer of Doctor Who in 1980, Nathan-Turner had
decreed that the programme's incidental music would be devised in-house
by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, rather than allocated to external
composers. More recently, however, his position had softened, and the
commission for Paradise Towers went to freelancer David Snell, who
had submitted samples which impressed Nathan-Turner. Unfortunately, as
Snell's work began to be dubbed onto the completed episodes,
Nathan-Turner was dismayed by the results, finding the music dull and
repetitive. On September 11th, Nathan-Turner wrote to Snell to inform
him that his incidental music would not be used. The composer was
aghast, having been unaware there were any misgivings about his work,
and offered to rescore as much of the programme as necessary free of
charge. Nathan-Turner, however, had already asked Keff McCulloch to step
in and hastily put together a replacement composition; McCulloch had
already worked on the season opener, Time And The
Rani, and was then in the process of scoring the year's third
serial, Delta And The Bannermen. Snell
would not work on Doctor Who again, but went on to a long career
as a conductor, with his work appearing in feature films such as
Chocolat and Belle.

The Hungerford massacre on August 19th resulted in
Paradise Towers being reedited for overseas
sale

During the months between the completion of Paradise Towers and its
transmission, the United Kingdom suffered one of the worst mass killings
in its modern history, when Michael Ryan went on a shooting spree in the
town of Hungerford, Berkshire. Sixteen people died before Ryan committed
suicide, and in the weeks that followed, violence on British television
came under careful scrutiny. Although no alterations were made to
Paradise Towers prior to its broadcast in October, complaints
from the public prompted BBC1 Controller Michael Grade to ask
Nathan-Turner to reedit the serial for overseas sale. As a result,
several trims were made to the sequences in Tilda and Tabby's flat which
made conspicuous use of knives.

Meanwhile, Wyatt was happy with his first Doctor Who story, and
began to consider the possibility of a sequel to Paradise Towers.
This would have revisited the Kangs, now sent away from the complex to
attend a boarding school but instead to determined to find their male
counterparts. Nothing would come of this, however, and Wyatt would instead
write The Greatest Show In The Galaxy for
Season Twenty-Five.